So far, one of the top poll-getters has been "Lincoln's Grave." The version posted in my poll was taken from a more than ten-year-old scan of an enlargement I had made many years before that. I used a simple low-res flatbed scanner at my work (which was the only scanner I had access to at the time). The 640x480 size shown is the poll is about the maximum it can be sized to without losing sharpness.
So, now that I have a scanner (Epson 4490) with transparency-handling capability, I decided to do a brand new 4800-dpi scan from the original negative. I expected the new scan to look at least slightly better. What I did
not expect would be that it would look
drastically different.
First, here's the version made from the old scan, which I've posted on the poll thread:
Now, here's the new scan. The only postprocessing has been to resize it to match and clean up some dust spots. I made no changes to the tonality of the image.
(Notice that the cropping is different -- the second is from the entire negative, while the first came from a print that had itself already been cropped.)
There's no question that the second is a more
exact rendition of what's on the negative The big question, though, is which do you think is better
as an image? I'm interested in your comments (maybe especially from those who prefer the first version).